Mountain Justice. Tricia Shapiro
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and mines extensively elsewhere in the region, hires most of its employees from out of state, Bo says, because coal companies would prefer to rid the coalfields of natives who might someday be in their way or complain about what they’re doing. (West Virginia’s population in 1950 was more than 2 million, and had grown each decade for the past century and a half; by 2005 its population had shrunk to 1.8 million. While West Virginia’s population was shrinking, the overall population of the United States nearly doubled between 1950 and 2005. West Virginia’s anomalous population loss is overwhelmingly concentrated in the coalfields in the southern part of the state.)
Bo explains to the radio listeners that a mix of toxic chemicals (and in winter, antifreeze) is sprayed on coal at the plant next to Marsh Fork Elementary School—and that three teachers there have died of cancer in the past few years; a former principal, just retired, now has bone cancer; two girls who went to school there have had ovarian cancer, highly unusual in very young women—one of them has died. Other kids at the school have asthma and blood disorders.
“We’re inviting everyone in,” he says. “There’s a place in this [campaign] for everyone. This is not just an Appalachian problem, it’s a national problem. It’s a worldwide problem, when you come right down to it. America’s cheap electricity does come at the expense of coalfield residents. Why should someone in West Virginia lose their home for the profit of a coal company? That’s not right. That’s not American.”
Around the time of this radio interview, I begin corresponding with john johnson, intrigued by how things he said at the meeting in Blacksburg, coming from an anarchist, eco-centric perspective, so closely connect with Judy and Bo’s sense that MTR exemplifies a rush toward bankruptcy in America’s current way of life. “I agree totally,” john says. “MTR is totally an example of the utter insanity of modern industrial capitalism. I don’t think it’s just America. It’s the whole modern world. The flip side is that America and other cultures also have a lot of ingenuity and creativity when it comes to doing things differently.”
john’s a “damn Yankee,” as he puts it. (Yankees live up north. Damn Yankees come south and don’t go back.) He grew up in the Northeast, then his family moved to Tennessee when he was fifteen. In college, at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, he found himself becoming more open to “alternative ways of viewing the world. I’ll be straight with you—part of it was from doing drugs, smoking pot and dropping acid. And part of it was from listening to punk rock music and heavy metal, which has a very rebellious, challenge-authority thing going on. And I started meeting people who were acting on their beliefs.” He began attending protests and meetings of activist groups, and became involved in environmental/racial justice campaigns in Chattanooga. Among the environmental activists he met were people working on forest issues, who eventually connected him with Earth First! “In the early 1990s, I got exposed to EF!, I got exposed to the anarchist movement—I got exposed to the most radical wing of the anarchist movement, the anti-civilization bunch. Those ideas have had a profound influence on the way I view things.” He’s matured enough that he no longer thinks he has The Right Answer for the way the world should run, but “I do know there are slivers of the truth, there are things that I know could and should work, but not the totality.”
In 1993, john and several others decided to reconstitute a southern Appalachian bioregional chapter of the radical environmental movement Earth First!, which they named Katuah, the Cherokee word for the region. Before then, in 1991, he’d decided to drop out of college and become a “full-time revolutionary activist, and to dedicate my life to overthrowing the government, and the corporations, and the whole social order, which I perceive as very wrong.” At the same time, in the early 1990s, he was protesting against the first Gulf War and against police brutality.
By 1994, “I really liked the Earth First! take on things, the ideology of Deep Ecology and biocentrism.”(Deep Ecology holds that humans are first and foremost part of nature, and that living ecosystems have the same sort of value and right to well-being as humankind, regardless of their usefulness to humans.) So john made a conscious decision to focus on environmental issues. Besides, “Earth Firsters are a lot of fun. Even the non-Earth First! [environmentalists], the mainstream conservationists, are great people.
“By 1996, 1997 my environmentalism had transformed from an intellectual thing to a totally heartfelt, passionate—I tell people that not only am I in love with my fiancée, Amanda, but I am hotly in love with the landscape of southern Appalachia.” Before then, “I couldn’t talk to you about the particulars of nature. I could just tell you why we needed to protect it,” as our life-support system. “Now that I have this interest in it, and this love affair with it, I’m trying to learn it. Because I want to talk to people about the particulars, about salamanders, and freshwater mollusks, and the different kinds of trees.”
While I’m enjoying seeing individuals as different as Bo, Judy, and john on the same page, other people are worried that MJS is becoming too radical-fringy.
One of those people is Dave Cooper. Born in Cincinnati, Dave grew up Republican, conservative, middle-class. When he was still in high school, during the Carter administration, the first Arab oil embargo and ensuing “energy crisis” hit home: “It was crystal clear that we needed to do energy conservation then,” he says. “And then we just forgot about it.” Dave went to Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, then worked at a General Motors plant in Ohio for seven years as a quality control engineer. When that plant closed down, he went to work for a defense contractor for three years.
During this time, in 1986, he joined the Sierra Club, mostly because he’d gone camping and hiking when he was a kid and missed it. He went on his first national Sierra Club outing that year, and “got exposed to some other Sierra Club people—and they’re all talking about lobbying and writing letters to Congress. I thought they were a bunch of kooks.” Two decades later, he’s a full-time activist. In the past year and a half, he’s done nearly 180 roadshow audiovisual presentations and other talks on MTR in 13 states, many of them at colleges and universities, some for radio and TV, others for churches, civic groups, environmental clubs, and even a corporation or two.
“I’m a little concerned,” he writes in late February, “about the tilt of our MJS group and membership towards the EF! side. It needs to be more mainstream and we have to talk—and listen—to regular folks if we want to get our message across and be heard. I’m speaking to all these Rotary Clubs, and you really have to tone down the eco-blabber or they will tune you out immediately. I think this may be a problem this summer if we don’t get the more mainstream groups like KFTC [Kentuckians for the Commonwealth] on board.”
MJS at this point already includes very different sorts of people—and clearly understands the need to include people with a much greater range of differences if they’re to have any success with building a mass movement against MTR.
One set of differences among MJSers concerns perspectives on nature: Some are more inclined to see nature in terms of the usefulness of its various elements to humans, while others see nature primarily as something that has value in and of itself. The first point of view is sometimes labelled “anthropocentric,” the second “biocentric.” In practice they’re not so much two separate camps as they are two directions that encompass a whole range of attitudes toward nature. Extremists in either direction are unlikely to be interested in MJS: neither anthropocentrist extremists who see no value in nature at all beyond its utility to humans, nor biocentric extremists of the anti-civilization camp, who believe that the development of human society past the hunter-gatherer way of life has been a mistake. In between those extremes, most of the range of anthropo-to-biocentric opinion is present among MJSers from the start, with common ground found in the idea of nature as our life-support system; people who are working to protect that system primarily for its value to themselves can work side-by-side with others working to protect it for its own sake. The mutual respect needed for meeting on that common ground is relatively easy in this case, as MJS participants generally share a sense that humans are part of a larger natural community to which they have responsibilities, and a sense that it’s wrong to plunder nature and leave it a wasteland.
Another set of differences concerns how activists see—or don’t see—the fight against